“They want three hundred dollars for the set.”
“Yeah,” he said, “and I want a pony.”
Cherry laughed. “You do want a pony. Every dog you show me is the size of a small horse.”
“I see you eyeing that china...” One of the people running the sale had wandered over—a guy in his seventies who looked like he was playing an antiquarian in a movie. Waistcoat. Rosy cheeks. Glasses at the end of his nose. “It’s a complete set.”
“I think it’s missing a gravy boat...” Tom became a different person at estate sales. Ridiculously gruff and stubborn. (Maybe this was who he was with his coworkers.)
“Made in England,” the man said. “Hardly used.”
“Well, who has any use for china?” Tom said. “It just sits in your cabinet until your own inevitable estate sale.”
“Exactly,” Cherry said.
Tom frowned at her over the man’s shoulder.
She picked up a footed platter. It was beautiful.
“That’s a very rare pattern,” the man said, then leaned toward Tom as if he was confiding in him. “Your lovely wife has a good eye.”
Cherry wasn’t Tom’s wife. She was his girlfriend.
She glanced up at Tom. He wasn’t smiling, but his eyes were bright. “I mean,” he said, “I can’t argue with you there.”
Cherry smiled.
The man put his hand over his heart, theatrically. “Madame, put that smile away. I wasn’t prepared for it.”
She laughed and rolled her eyes.
“You should let her do the wheeling and dealing,” the man said to Tom.
“They’re beautiful dishes,” Cherry said, “but we can’t afford them.”
“I’d be prepared to let them go for one hundred dollars,” he said.
“Seventy-five,” Tom said.
The man looked at Cherry. She smiled.
“Sold,” he said, “to the lovely young lady who won’t let these dishes die in a cabinet.”
Tom paid in cash. The man seemed reluctant to let the china go.He looked up at Cherry and shook his head. “Dimplesandfreckles, that shouldn’t be legal.”
As they were walking away, Tom said, “He doesn’t know the half of it.”
Cherry was made assistant department head. Then department head. Then put in charge of several departments.
Tom was unwavering in his support—even though he disliked her coworkers and felt indifferent at best about the railroad. He listened to her talk. He helped her strategize. He never let her feel alone in her frustrations. (Western Alliance got so much free expertise out of Tom over their dinner table.)
Early evening, a weeknight, the year that Tom quit:
They’d stopped at the grocery store on the way home from work, and they were both tired and hungry, and Tom was putting away groceries while Cherry started dinner, and Tom was complaining about one of the account managers.
“She’s soliteral,” he said. “We don’t have to use the word ‘jobs’ in every recruitment headline. If someone doesn’t understand that the ad is about jobs, they’re not smart enough to work on trains anyway. I asked her if she needed restaurants to hang a sign that said ‘food’ in the window...”
Cherry had been slicing cucumbers. She turned away from the cutting board.
